As mentioned in “The Buzz is Building…” there was quite a bit of rumbling before Java One about things that were going to be announced. I still haven’t gone through the posted sessions yet but I’ll go over some of the announcements and my opinion on them from what I have heard:Java SDK source available : I think that this was a given seeing as it was promised in the fall and their first half of 07 usually signifies Java One. I am excited about this as it opens up some new possibilities such as bundling with open source OSs such as Fedora (no more fiddling with JPackage or swearing at gcj). Another hope is that it allow people to port to new platforms that Sun didn’t want or have resources to port to. I’d love to see some mobile devices get a full blown Java SE implementation. A Nokia 880 would be my first choice. Yes it has limited resources but if you could run simple applications on it, we would be a step ahead.

Java FX and FX Mobile : The “big” announcement. Some are putting up against Flash and MS’s Silverlight? products. From what I can tell, it was a rushed announcement with not much meat behind it. Rebranding an alpha stage product and declaring it the next big thing doesn’t give me much confidence. Along with the current lack of media support in Java (see: Java SE Media (or not) at JavaOne) makes it tough to believe that this will have a huge impact. I do like the FX Mobile strategy as it confirms my feelings that mobile devices are becoming powerful enough to support more than Java ME (CDC or CLDC). I would like to be able to have my same SE code run on my Blackberry (within resource constraints) as on my desktop. Why can’t I leverage the knowledge and techniques (not to mention the tooling) used for Swing for mobile apps. Netbeans is definately pushing this with their latest wireless toolkit releases. Now we will have to wait to see what this becomes….

There were quite a few other smaller announcements and demoes such as NASA’s World Wind and SDK and Glossitope (formerly AB5K) but I’ll get to those later once I get to have more time to research them.